Skeptical News for 4 June 2001

Archive of previous NTS Skeptical News listings

Sunday, June 03, 2001

MAGAZINE ARTICLES 6

From: Raymond Nelke

The Ghost's Vocabulary - 91.10
The Ghost's Vocabulary How the computer listens for Shakespeare's "voiceprint" by Edward Dolnick In 1842 literature and science met
with a thud. Alfred Tennyson had just published his poem "The Vision of Sin." Among the appreciative ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/shakes/...
EXCERPT......The machinery in place, Valenza and Elliott began by testing Shakespeare's poetry against that of thirty other writers.
Exciting results came quickly: The disputed "Shall I Die?" poem seemed not to be Shakespeare's after all. Three of the leading claimants
to Shakespeare's work--Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Sir Edward Dyer--were decisively ruled out. To Elliott's
good-humored consternation, the test dealt just as harshly with the claims put forward on behalf of the Earl of Oxford. Worse was to
follow. For even as this first round of tests ruled out the best-known Shakespeare candidates, it left a few surprising contenders. One
possibility for the "real" Shakespeare: Queen Elizabeth I. "That did it for our chance of appearing in Science," Elliott laments, "But it
vastly increased our chance of getting into the National Enquirer." (To his dismay, Elliott did find himself in Science, not as the
co-author of a weighty research paper but as the subject of a skeptical news brief with the headline "Did Queen Write Shakespeare's
Sonnets?")

The Case for Oxford - 91.10
The Case for Oxford by Tom Bethell Hamlet is derived from a story in Francois de Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques (1576), not yet
translated into English when Shakespeare adapted it. Shakespeare introduced new characters and greatly ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/shakes/beth.htm

Reply by Matus - 91.10
Tom Bethell's case for Oxford demonstrates once again that in the thousands of works on Shakespeare and his plays, something can be
found to support any notion. It also demonstrates that, as usual, Oxfordians must often resort to ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/shakes/...

Reply by Bethell - 91.10
... to mention Shakespeare doesn't concern me. I am pleased to hear that plays were classified as "riffraffs" by literary folk: this would
help to explain the use of a pseudonym by a play-writing nobleman. I agree that Shakespeare's ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/shakes/...

Looking For Shakespeare - 91.10
Looking For Shakespeare Two partisans explain and debate the authorship question. During the past two centuries doubts about the
identity of the author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare have brought a small cottage ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/shakes/...

Phoebe-Lou Adams Excerpts - 00.08 (Sidebar)
... professional cryptographers, have great fun with the rich and strange characters who have unearthed coded messages in
Shakespeare's plays, even while they demolish the alleged codes. November 1957 THE VANISHING EVANGELIST by Lately ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/08/plaexcerpts.htm

Looking For Shakespeare - 91.10
Looking For Shakespeare Two partisans explain and debate the authorship question. During the past two centuries doubts about the
identity of the author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare have brought a small cottage ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/shakes/...

The Case for Oxford - 91.10
... from a story in Francois de Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques (1576), not yet translated into English when Shakespeare adapted it.
Shakespeare introduced new characters and greatly enlarged the roles assigned to various characters ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/shakes/beth.htm

The Case for Shakespeare - 91.10
The Case for Shakespeare by Irvin Matus The new reading room of the Folger Shakespeare Library is dominated by a huge painting of
the sort that Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell might have characterized as being of "more than usually ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/shakes/matus.

It's a Jumble Out There - 00.09
... Atlantic Monthly and Atlantic Unbound. The Mynachlogddu-to-Stonehenge trek continues a long tradition of experimental
archaeology, with intrepid researchers exploring historical mysteries and putting speculative solutions to the ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/09/murphy.htm

The Diffusionists Have Landed - 00.01
... Related links: Archaeology & Ethnography A division of the National Park Service that "provides national coordination for the
protection, preservation, and interpretation of America's archeological and ethnographic resources." ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/01/001stengel.htm

The Atlantic | Apr 2001 | Letters to the Editors
... Goddess religion is not based on history, archaeology, or belief in any Great Goddess past or present. Our spirituality is based on
experience, on a direct relationship with the cycles of birth, growth, death, and regeneration in ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/04/letters.htm

Space alien rates George W. Bush

WASHINGTON -- The mysterious space alien whose endorsement of George W. Bush
helped him win the election has issued a candid assessment of Bush's first 150 days in
office -- and he gives our new commander in chief a humiliating D-minus!

Much of the page rants about conspiracies and "political pressue" on
NASA as well as casting doubts about the integrity of NASA. Hoagland
does
address the evidence but either distorts the findings or just ignores
data that
he doesn't like.

The new photograph is accompanied by data from MOLA
(http://ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/tharsis/mola.html). MOLA is a
laser
altimeter used to map the surface of Mars. This data was combined with
the photograph to produce a reasonably accurate picture of the Face (it
actually is a mesa).

Hoagland dismisses the MOLA data with these paragraphs:

"The reality is that it is highly unlikely that any of us would
recognize a picture of our own grandmother if it was stretched
horizontally, flattened, compressed and shown upside down. So of course
it doesn't look much like a Face. And there is one other major problem
with NASA's argument. The MOLA instrument they are relying so much on
has a resolution of 300 meters per pixel.

Or, to put it another way: NASA is basing its entire public "its just a
hill" argument on a MOLA "image" that is six times worse than the

25-year-old Viking data! At that resolution, an object has to be about
the size of baseball stadium to even show up. Frankly, trying to make
their argument based on this "non-image" (which they still had to
distort) is laughable ... and obviously desperate."

What is laughable is that Hoagland (or whoever wrote this) not only got
the resolution for MOLA wrong, they also confused the horizontal
resolution with the vertical resolution.The horizontal resoltion is 150
meteres per pixel. This is not great but MOLA can measure heights with
an accuracy of +/- 30cm. This is the important bit of data that Hoagland
ignores. Using the laser altimetry data (combined with the MGS images)
we get a
picture that has a
resolution of 1.5m per pixel.

From what I have read of true believer reactions most have dismssed the
findings as NASA can not be trusted, they nuked the original face of the
photographs released are not of the same area imaged by Viking. The
people
engaging in covering up data and distorting the truth are not NASA. It
is
alleged experts such as Hoagland who gleefully will twist the data to
suit
their own ends.

To keep the myth that the "Face on Mars" is an artificial structure
alive I
suggest that the proponents cannot rely on fanciful convulted digital
images to
sustain their beliefs. The new data does put the issue to rest and only
by
ignoring it can Hoagland cope with it.

Shaun

UFO sightings to rise

Reports of UFO sightings are expected to rise over the next few weeks as
the planet Mars passes close to the Earth.
Astronomers expect many skywatchers to mistake the planet for some other
unearthly body, as it will appear as a bright red light hovering over
the
tops of houses and trees.

On 13 June, Mars will be closer to the Earth than it has been for two
years
- close enough for the planet's polar ice caps to be seen through a
small
telescope.

You don't need a big telescope... to see one of the polar ice caps and
dark
patches on the planet

Society for Popular Astronomy

But leading astronomer Sir Patrick Moore says that although more
visible,
Mars will still be about 42 million miles away.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "It will be nice and bright, low
down in the sky after dark and it can look like a bright red star - and
it
normally sparks a new crop of flying saucers reports."

Michael Soper of Contact International, which researches and monitors
UFO
sightings, agreed there was a correlation between planet activity and
unusual sightings, but he disputed that people could not tell the
difference between the two.

He told BBC News Online: "The two do go together.

"But we do not expect there to be a boost in UFO sightings for another
six
months, which is linked to a rapid decline in the number of sun spots.

"The closeness of Mars used to produce more UFO sightings in the 1950s
and
60s, but less so nowadays."

Mars lowdown
For astronomy buffs, the approaching Mars will appear quite low on the
horizon in the southern sky, between the constellations of Scorpius and
Sagittarius.

But a crystal clear night does not offer the best conditions for
observing
the planet, say experts.

Robin Scagell, vice president of the Society for Popular Astronomy, says
slightly misty weather is better because it cancels out the shimmering
effect caused by temperature differences.

Sir Patrick Moore: "UFO sightings expected"

He said: "You don't need a big telescope. A magnification of 40 or 50
will
enable you to see one of the polar ice caps and dark patches on the
planet.

"Mars really does look red, or rather a kind of salmon pink. It's caused
by
rusty dust. Mars has a lot of iron in its soil, which gives the whole
planet this reddish colour."

For a really spectacular view of Mars, however, it is best to wait until
August 2003.

Then the planet will be closer to the Earth than it has been for about
6,000 years - a mere 34.8 million miles.

The European Mars Express mission is due to be launched in 2003.

It will carry the mainly British Beagle II probe, which will land on the
planet to search for evidence of water and other signs of life .

Space expert says life may be on moon - Ananova Alerting

A US geologist says we should go back to the moon because it may contain
some form of life.

Jack Green from California State University thinks the lunar landscape
shows evidence of volcanic activity.

He says although he's not expecting Godzilla to jump out of a crater,
there
may be early life forms on the moon.

He says past eruptions provided the ingredients needed for life and the
subsequent deep-freeze will have preserved them.

Professor Green says early life forms could have been produced from the
methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide, water and sulphur provided during
eruptions.

The best chances of finding life will be in the ice which is expected to
be
found in permanently shadowed areas of the moon, he says.

Professor Green told Space.com: "Those ices would last forever, it's so
cold. I'm very careful and not saying Godzilla is going to jump out of a
crater. I'm dealing with the most conservative protolife, the beginnings
of
life."

He was speaking at the US National Space Society's 20th Annual
International Space Development conference in New Mexico.

Fwd: Rachel #724: Fluoridation: Time for a Second Look?

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=======================Electronic Edition=================

. .
. RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH NEWS #724 .
. ---May 10, 2001--- .
. HEADLINES: .
. FLUORIDATION: TIME FOR A SECOND LOOK? .
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=====================================================

FLUORIDATION: TIME FOR A SECOND LOOK?

by Paul, Ellen and Michael Connett*

In 1997 the union representing scientists, engineers and lawyers
at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington,
D.C., voted to support a California citizen initiative to stop
fluoridation of public drinking water. In 1999 the union's
vice-president released a paper explaining the union's opposition
to fluoridation.[1]

Fluoridation is the practice of adding fluoride to the public
water supply to reduce dental decay. U.S. fluoridation trials
began in 1945 and by 1992 approximately 56% of the U.S. public
received its water from fluoridated systems.[2]

Typically, fluoride-containing (or -generating) compounds are
added to water to bring the level up to 1 milligram of fluoride
ion per liter (1 part per million). In 1986 EPA set a Maximum
Contaminant Level (MCL) for fluoride in drinking water at 4
ppm.[3] The MCL was based on only one adverse health effect:
skeletal fluorosis, a crippling bone disease.

Fluoridation of public water supplies has stirred passionate
debate for over 50 years. Now new data is refining the debate. It
appears that some of the early claims for fluoridation's benefits
were inflated. In recent years tooth decay has declined in both
fluoridated and non-fluoridated communities. In fact, the largest
U.S. survey indicates that the benefit to fluoridated communities
amounts to 0.6 fewer decayed tooth surfaces per child, which is
less than one percent of the tooth surfaces in a child's
mouth.[4]

The public health community justified medicating whole
communities via public drinking water using certain arguments
that recent research has now shown to be false. For example, in
1945 scientists believed that fluoride had to be swallowed to be
effective. However, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has
recently acknowledged that fluoride's mechanism of action is
primarily topical, not systemic.[5] This means that you don't
need to swallow fluoride to reap its tiny benefits.

A second early belief, now known to be false, is that fluoride is
an essential nutrient. There is no evidence of any disease
related to fluoride deficiency. Natural levels of fluoride in
human milk (0.01 ppm) are approximately a hundred times less than
baby formula reconstituted with fluoridated water.[6]

A third early belief was that dental fluorosis (a defect of the
tooth enamel caused by fluoride's interference with the growing
tooth) would occur in only about 10% of the children drinking
water fluoridated at 1 ppm and would occur only in its mildest
form. Today fluorosis occurs on two or more teeth in 30% of
children in areas where the water is fluoridated, and not all in
its mildest form.[7]

A fourth early belief was that 1 ppm fluoride in drinking water
provided an ample margin of safety against toxic effects. Not
only is there no safety margin for dental fluorosis but there is
growing evidence that there may be no safety margin for changes
to bone structure and impacts on the brain, thyroid, and other
soft tissues, especially when it is coupled with nutrient
deficiencies, particularly iodide.

THE EVIDENCE

1) In 1998 the results of a long-term, low-dose rat study were
published.[8] Two groups of rats were exposed to two different
kinds of fluoride at 1 ppm in distilled water. A third group
received only distilled water. Amyloid deposits (associated with
Alzheimer's Disease and other forms of dementia) were elevated in
the brains of both fluoridated groups compared to the control
group. The authors speculate that fluoride enables aluminum to
cross the blood-brain barrier.

2) Millions of people in India and China suffer a crippling bone
disease called skeletal fluorosis, caused by moderate to high
natural levels of fluoride (1.5 to 9 ppm) in their water.[9]
Skeletal fluorosis has several stages of severity, with the less
severe being chronic joint pain. "Because some of the clinical
symptoms mimic arthritis, the first two clinical phases of
skeletal fluorosis could be easily misdiagnosed."[3] Arthritis is
now at epidemic levels in the U.S. Fluoride's plausible
contribution has been ignored, but needs to be taken seriously.

3) Since fluoridation began in 1945 our exposure to other sources
of fluoride has increased substantially. These include processing
food and beverages with fluoridated water; air pollution from
fluoride emitting industries; pesticide residues; vitamins; and
dental products. If 1 ppm in drinking water were the only source
of fluoride, the average person would ingest 2 milligrams (mg) of
fluoride each day, though some may get less because they use
bottled water, or they drink less water than the average adult.
In 1991, the federal Department of Health and Human Services
(DHHS) estimated that the range of exposure in communities with
approximately 1 ppm fluoride in the water was 1.58 to 6.6 mg per
day.[10]

4) The dose of 1.58 to 6.6 mg per day overlaps the dose found to
depress the functioning of the human thyroid gland. At 2.27 to
4.54 mg/day, fluoride has been found to "completely relieve" the
symptoms of hyperthyroidism (overactive thyroid).[11] With
fluoride's known capacity to depress thyroid activity, it seems
that there may be a link between current fluoride consumption and
the prevalence of hypothyroidism (underactive thyroid). More than
twenty million people in the U.S. receive treatment for thyroid
problems and many others are thought to go undiagnosed.[12]

5) Fluoride is a hormone disrupter. It mimics the action of many
water-soluble hormones by interacting with G proteins, which
transmit hormonal messages across cell membranes.[13]
Additionally, fluoride accumulates in the pineal gland and may
reduce melatonin production.[14]

6) Fluoride (50-75 mg per day) given to osteoporosis patients to
strengthen bones has actually increased their rate of hip
fractures.[15,16] Of 18 studies conducted since 1990, 10 have
found an association between water fluoridation and hip fractures
in the elderly.[17] According to the Agency for Toxic Substances
and Disease Registry (ATSDR): "If this effect is confirmed, it
would mean that hip fracture in the elderly replaces dental
fluorosis in children as the most sensitive endpoint of fluoride
exposure."[18] Hip fracture is not a minor problem: in the U.S.
up to 50,000 people die each year of osteoporosis-related hip
fractures.[19]

7) Some evidence suggests that fluoride causes bone cancer in
male rats and perhaps in young men.[20, 21]

8) A recent report by the Greater Boston Physicians for Social
Responsibility reviews studies showing that fluoride interferes
with brain function in young animals and in children, reducing
IQ.[22]

Most European countries have rejected fluoridation. Recognizing
that there are simple and effective alternatives, they have
applied the precautionary principle. Their children's teeth have
not suffered as a consequence. Parents willing to expose their
children to fluoride can simply purchase fluoridated toothpaste
(which contains 1000 to 1500 ppm fluoride -- read the warning
label on the package).[23] The American policy of giving fluoride
to children by medicating whole communities with a potent drug
that may harm some people seems a dubious practice at best. At
worst it violates the primary principle of medical ethics: First
do no harm. Furthermore, it violates the ethical principle of
informed consent.

In May 2000 the Fluoride Action Network (FAN) was formed by a
coalition of activists and scientists from 12 countries (see:
http://www.fluoridealert.org). FAN's goal is to end fluoridation
and minimize exposure to fluoride. FAN's founding members include
the late David Brower; Teddy Goldsmith; Michael Colby; Gar Smith;
Terri Swearingen; the union representing professional employees
at EPA headquarters; and Dr. Hardy Limeback, Canada's leading
dental authority on fluoridation who in 1999 apologized for
having promoted fluoridation for 15 years.

We urge our colleagues working on public health and environmental
issues to become involved and take a second look at fluoridation.

===================

* Paul Connett is professor of chemistry at St. Lawrence
University in Canton N.Y.; Ellen Connett is editor of WASTE NOT ,
82 Judson, Canton N.Y. 13617; Michael Connett is FAN's webmaster
http://www.fluoridealert.org

[2] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center
for Prevention Services, Division of Oral Health, "Water Supply
Statistics" (Atlanta, Georgia: Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, 1993). Available at http://www.cdc.gov/nohss/FSSupplyStats.htm.

[4] J.A. Brunelle and J.P. Carlos, "Recent Trends in Dental
Caries in U.S. Children and the Effect of Water Fluoridation,"
JOURNAL OF DENTAL RESEARCH Vol. 69, Special Issue (February
1990), pgs. 723-727 and discussion pgs. 820-823.

[10] Ad Hoc Subcommitttee on Fluoride of the Committee to
Coordinate Environmental Health and Related Programs, Public
Health Service, Department of Health and Human Services. REVIEW
OF FLUORIDE: BENEFITS AND RISKS, REPORT OF THE AD HOC COMMITTEE
ON FLUORIDE OF THE COMMITTEE TO COORDINATE ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH
AND RELATED PROGRAMS (February 1991), pg. 17.

[14] Jennifer Anne Luke, THE EFFECT OF FLUORIDE ON THE PHYSIOLOGY
OF THE PINEAL GLAND , Ph.D Thesis, University of Surrey, United
Kingdom (1997). See also Jennifer Luke, "Fluoride Deposition in
the Aged Human Pineal Gland," CARIES RESEARCH Vol. 35 (2001),
pgs. 125-128.

[17] Paul Connett and Michael Connett, "The Emperor Has No
Clothes: A Critique of the CDC's Promotion of Fluoridation,"
WASTE NOT #468 (October 2000), pgs. 27-28. Available at http://-
www.fluoridealert.org/cdc.htm.

[21] Perry D. Cohn, A BRIEF REPORT ON THE ASSOCIATION OF DRINKING
WATER FLUORIDATION AND THE INCIDENCE OF OSTEOSARCOMA AMONG YOUNG
MALES. (Trenton, N.J.: New Jersey Department of Health, November
8, 1992).

[22] Ted Schettler and others, IN HARM'S WAY: TOXIC THREATS TO
CHILD DEVELOPMENT (Cambridge, Mass.: Greater Boston Physicians
for Social Responsibility [GBPSR] , May 2000). Available at
http://www.igc.org/psr/ or from GBPSR in Cambridge, Mass.;
telephone (617) 497-7440.

[23] Paul Connett and Ellen Connett, "The Fluoridation of
Drinking Water: a house of cards waiting to fall. Part 1: The
Science," WASTE NOT #373 (November 1996). See Table 2 pgs. 6-7.

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Interview w/ crackpot Alex Chiu

From: August Pamplona

They're going to interview Alex Chiu on Slashdot. He's the guy
selling
magnetic bracelets that will allow you to live forever (his URL is
http://www.alexchiu.com/). Unfortunately it's probably way too late to
receive enough moderation points so that any new questions will actually
end
up being asked, though perhaps his responses (whenever they come) would
be
of interest, nevertheless.

Crystal water polymer

FWD (IUFO) [1/2] Occult Entities connections to UFOnauts

Posted by Terry W. Colvin A very interesting John Keel article below.
A must read for all UFOlogists.
A very serious warning to all researchers.

(Behind the metallic ships of the reptoids. Underneath the futuristic
space suits of the greys. At the very core of the high tech
machineries of the Dracos lie the occult paranormal entities which all
UFOlogists and researchers must be aware of and protect themselves
from. We can lose ourselves if we are not careful and don't have
adequite protection. The following will introduce people to what we
are dealing with underneath the so called UFO Phenomenon in which the
nuts-and-bolts may only be the outer manifestation of a very
malevolent and insidious nature. At the end of the article. You will
surely ask, "What the hell are we really dealing with??". That's
right. We ought to know what on earth we are dealing with. -Albert)

"Within a year after I had launched my full-time UFO investigating
effort in 1966, the phenomenon had zeroed in on me, just as it had
done with the British newspaper editor Arthur Shuttlewood and so many
others. My telephone ran amok first, with mysterious strangers calling
day and night to deliver bizarre messages "from the space people."
Then I was catapulted into the dreamlike fantasy world of demonology.
I kept rendezvous with black Cadillacs on Long Island, and when I
tried to pursue them, they would disappear impossibly on dead-end
roads. Throughout 1967, 1 was called out in the middle of the night to
go on silly wild-goose chases and try to affect "rescues" of troubled
contactees. Luminous aerial objects seemed to follow me around like
faithful dogs. The objects seemed to know where I was going and where
I had been. I would check into a motel chosen at random only to find
that someone had made a reservation in my name and had even left a
string of nonsensical telephon e messages for me. I was plagued by
impossible coincidences, and some of my closest friends in New York,
none of whom was conversant with the phenomenon, began to report
strange experiences of their own poltergeists erupted in their
apartments, ugly smells of hydrogen sulfide haunted them. One girl of
my acquaintance suffered an inexplicable two-hour mental blackout
while she was sitting under a hair dryer alone in her own apartment.
More than once I woke up in the middle of t he night to find myself
unable to move, with a huge dark apparition standing over me.

For a time I questioned my own sanity. I kept profusive notes-a daily
journal which now reads like something from the pen of Edgar Allen Poe
or H. P. Lovecraft.

Previous to all this I was a typical hard-boiled skeptic. I sneered at
the occult. I had once published a book, Jadoo, which denigrated the
mystical legends of the Orient. I tried to adopt a very scientific
apprto ufology, and this meant that I scoffed at the many contactee
reports. But as my experiences mounted and investigations broadened, I
rapidly changed my views.

While traveling through some twenty states to check firsthand the
innumerable UFO reports, I was astonished to find many silent
contactees, and while the physical descriptions they offered were
varied, it quickly became obvious that they were all suffering the
same physiological and psychological symptoms. Through these silent
contactees (people whose stories have never been published) I actually
entered into communication with the entities themselves. When a UFO
would land on an isolated farm and the ufona ut would visit a
contactee, he or she would call me immediately and I would actually
converse with the entity by telephone, sometimes for hours. It all
sounds ridiculous now, but it happened. My notes, tapes, and other
materials testify to the fact.

I developed an elaborate system of checks and balances to preclude
hoaxes. Unrelated people in several states became a part of my secret
network to that mysterious "other world." I wasted months playing the
mischievous games of the elementals, searching for nonexistent UFO
bases, trying to find ways to protect witnesses from the "men in
black." Poltergeist manifestations seemed to break out wherever I
went. It was difficult to judge whether I was unwittingly creating
these situations in some manner, or whet her they were entirely
independent of my mind.

Now, in retrospect, I can see what was actually taking place. The
phenomenon was slowly introducing me to aspects I had never even
considered before. I was being led step by step from skepticism to
belief to-incredibly-disbelief. When my thinking went awry and my
concepts were wrong, the phenomenon actually led me back onto the
right path. It was all an educational process, and my teachers were
very, very patient. Other people who have become involved in this
situation have not been so lucky. They settled u pon and accepted a
single frame of reference and were quickly engulfed in disaster.
Several examples will be cited in this chapter.

But let's review some of the game playing first. In May 1967, the
entities promised the silent contactees that a big power failure could
be expected. On June 4, 1967, the Arab-Israeli six-day war broke out
in the Middle East. Early the next morning, June 5, a massive power
failure occurred in four states in the northeastern United States.
Throughout that month the contactees were warned that an even bigger
power failure was due. It would be nationwide in scope and would last
for three days, the entities pro mised, and would be followed by
natural catastrophes in July. New York City was scheduled to slide
into the ocean on July 2. The contactees did not broadcast these dire
predictions, yet the rumors snowballed. By mid-June nearly all of the
hardware stores in the flap areas had sold out their supplies of
candles and flashlights. Late that May, the UFO entities had also
declared that Pope Paul would visit Turkey in the coming months and
would be bloodily assassinated and that this would precipitate the
blackout and the disasters. Weeks later the Vatican suddenly announce
d that the Pope was, indeed, planning to visit Turkey in July. Panic
prevailed in the secret contactee circles.

I was astonished when I discovered that these same rumors were also
sweeping New York's hippie community. People began phoning me late in
June to ask me where I was going on July 2. I was not going anywhere.
I refused to join the exodus, and Manhattan did not sink into the sea.

Other predictions received that month began to come true right on the
nose, however. There were predicted plane crashes; a jet airliner
collided with a private plane over Henderson, North Carolina, killing,
among others, J. T. McNaughton who had just been appointed U.S.
Secretary of the Navy, and the next day, July 20, an identical
accident occurred in Brazil, killing some leading Brazilian politicos.

I started to get nervous.

What astonished me most was that these predictions were coming in from
a wide variety of sources. Trance mediums and automatic writers in
touch with the spirit world were coming up with the same things as the
UFO contactees. Often the prophecies were phrased identically in
different sections of the country. Even when they failed to come off,
we still could not overlook this peculiar set of correlative factors.

So convincing were these demonstrations that I finally packed up my
equipment, rented a car, and drove out to the flap area near Melville,
Long Island, to await the assassination and the blackout.

Just before I left Manhattan, I stopped in a local delicatessen and
bought three quarts of distilled water. I figured that a three-day
power failure would certainly be accompanied by a water shortage. On
my way out to Long Island I stopped in on a silent contactee, and he
told me he had received a brief visit from a UFO entity a short time
before. This entity had mentioned me, he said, and had given him a
message to relay to me. The message didn't make sense to the
contactee. It was, "Tell John we'll meet w ith him and help him drink
all that water." (The water was in the trunk of the car, and the
contactee had no way of knowing I had it.)

The Pope was not assassinated that weekend, happily, but I saw several
UFOs. They seemed to follow me around, as usual. And I was stuck with
all that distilled water.

Throughout the fall the predictions continued to come in, and a
surprisingly high percentage of them came true. Later in October I had
a lengthy long-distance call from a being who was allegedly a UFO
entity. He warned me that there would soon be a major disaster on the
Ohio River and that many people would drown. He also told me to expect
a startling development when President Johnson turned on the lights on
the White House Christmas tree in December, implying that a huge
blackout would take place as soon as the President pulled the switch.
The warning about the Ohio disaster disturbed me enough so that I
broke my own silence, and on November 3, I wrote to Mrs. Mary Hyre, a
reporter in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and warned her that we
might expect some sort of calamity in the coming weeks. She still has
that letter.

Around Thanksgiving I returned to West Virginia for a few days and
discovered that a number of people, none of whom knew about my
prophecy, had been having horrible dreams of a river disaster. Mrs.
Virginia Thomas, who lived in the heart of the TNT area, an abandoned
World War II ammunition dump, was one who told me in some detail about
her nightmares of people drowning in the river. Mrs. Hyre told me that
she had also been having disturbing dreams; dreams of pleading faces
and brightly wrapped Christmas pa ckages floating on the dark water of
the Ohio.

During my visit I saw more of those puzzling lights in the sky and
listened to more eerie tales of monsters and poltergeists. As usual, I
stayed in a motel across the river on the outskirts of Gallipolis,
Ohio, and every day I drove my rented car across the rickety 700-foot
span of the Silver Bridge which joined Point Pleasant with the Ohio
side.

There seemed to be an air of foreboding in Point Pleasant that
November-something that no one could quite put his finger on. When I
caught a plane for Washington, D.C., later I felt decidedly uneasy. I
remembered that all of the UFO predictions for July 1967 had come true
except the big one. There had been the plane crashes, and an
earthquake had taken place in Turkey just before the Pope flew there.
Several minor prophecies had also come true. Now, in December, I had a
long list to check off. In October, I had been told that "the Hopi and
Navajo Indians will make headlines shortly before Christmas." Sure
enough, early in December a blizzard struck the Indian reservations in
the Southwest, and they did make the headlines as rescue efforts were
launched to rush them supplies and medicine.

On the morning of December 11, I was awakened by a mysterious caller
who informed me that there would be an airplane disaster in Tucson,
Arizona. The next day an Air Force jet plowed into a shopping center
in Tucson.

On December 15, President Johnson held the usual Christmas tree
lighting ceremony at the White House. Because I was expecting a major
blackout, I warned a few close friends (who by now must have thought
that I was quite balmy) and was joined in my New York apartment by Dan
Drasin, the movie-TV producer, and another friend who is a police
official. We nervously watched the tree-lighting ceremony on
television. The President pushed the switch. The tree lit up, and the
assembled crowd oooed and ahhhed. Everyth ing went off as scheduled.
The nation's power systems did not blow a fuse.

But thirty seconds after the tree was turned on, an announcer
interrupted the news special with a sudden flash.

"A bridge between Gallipolis, Ohio, and West Virginia has just
collapsed," he intoned soberly. "It was heavily laden with rush-hour
traffic. There are no further details as yet. "

I was stunned. There was only one bridge on that section of the river.
The Silver Bridge between Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Ohio.
Christmas packages were floating in the dark waters of the Ohio.

The World Ended Last Night...

A few hours after the collapse of the Silver Bridge, on the other side
of the world the Prime Minister of Australia decided to go for a swim
on his favorite beach. He vanished. His body was never washed ashore.
The elementals had predicted this.

In the Soviet Union, a series of explosions rocked Moscow that
weekend. An apartment house blew up. A few blocks away, an automobile
belonging to an American newspaperman also exploded into small pieces.
There was no one near it at the time. Another prediction come true.

This is the tiger behind the door of prophecy. Some of the predictions
are unerringly accurate; so precise that there are no factors of
coincidence or lucky guesswork. The ultraterrestrials or elementals
are able to convince their friends (who sometimes also become victims)
that they have complete foreknowledge of all human events. Then, when
these people are totally sold, the ultraterrestrials introduce a joker
into the deck. They had me buying distilled water and fleeing to Long
Island in the summer of 19 67, fully convinced that Pope Paul was
going to be assassinated and that a worldwide blackout was going to
punish the world for three terrible days.

I was lucky. I didn't cry their warning from the housetops. I didn't
surround myself with a wild-eyed cult impressed with the accuracy of
the previous predictions.

Others haven't been so lucky.

Dr. Charles A. Laughead, an MD on the staff of Michigan State
University in East Lansing, Michigan, started communicating with
assorted entities "from outer space" in 1954, largely through trance
mediums who served as instruments for Ashtar and his cronies from that
great intergalactic council in the sky. A number of minor prophecies
were passed along, and as usual, they all came true on the nose. Then
Ashtar tossed in his bombshell. The world was going to end on December
21, 1954, he announced convincingly . He spelled out the exact nature
of the cataclysm: North America was going to split in two, and the
Atlantic coast would sink into the sea. France, England and Russia
were also slated for a watery grave. However, all was not lost. A few
chosen people would be rescued by spaceships. Naturally, Dr. Laughead
and his friends were among that select group. Having been impressed by
the validity of the earlier predictions of the entities, Dr. Laughead
took this one most seriousl y, made sober declarations to the pr ess,
and on December 21, 1954, he and a group of his fellow believers
clustered together in a garden to await rescue. They had been
instructed to wear no metal, and they therefore discarded belt
buckles, pens, clasps, cigarette lighters, and shoes with metal
eyelets. Then they waited.
And waited.
And waited.

That same year, another doctor named Wilhelm Reich was watching
glittering starlike objects maneuver over his home in Rangeley, Maine.
The "space people" had a little gift for him, too: a strange theory
about cosmic energies called Orgone. Dr. Reich had studied and worked
under Freud in Vienna and later held posts at several important
educational institutions. He was a brilliant, highly educated man. But
somehow he became convinced that Orgone was the vital life force of
the universe and that it even powere d the UFOs that were flooding the
world's skies in 1954. His colleagues and the Food and Drug
Administration viewed his theories with some dismay. He was drummed
out of the medical ranks, hauled into court, tried, and jailed. He
died in prison eight months later, a broken man still convinced that
he had unlocked a great cosmic secret.

Two years earlier, in that grand UFO year of 1952, two men were
driving through the mountains near Parana, Brazil, in the state of Sao
Paulo, when they encountered five saucer-shaped objects hovering in
the air. Later one of these men, Aladino Felix, revisited the spot,
and this time a UFO landed and he was invited aboard. He had a
pleasant chat with the saucer captain, a being who looked very human
and very ordinary, and he went away convinced that the Venusians were
paying us a friendly visit.

Then in March 1953, there was a knock at the door of Felix's home, and
his wife answered. She reported that there was "a priest" asking for
him. Because Felix was an atheist at the time, he was a bit surprised.
He was even more surprised when he walked out to meet the man. It was
his old friend, the flying saucer pilot, now turned out in a cashmere
suit, a white shirt with a stiff collar, and a neat blue tie.

This was the first of along series of visits during which the two men
discussed flying saucers and their mechanics and the state of the
universe at large. Mr. Felix kept careful notes of these conversations
and later put them into an interesting little book titled My Contact
with Flying Saucers, under the pseudonym of Dino Kraspedon. It was
first published in 1959 and was largely dismissed as just another
piece of crackpot literature. However, a careful reading reveals a
thorough knowledge of both theology and science, and many of the ideas
and phrases found only in most obscure occult and contactee literature
appear here. Among other things, the book also discusses an impending
cosmic disaster in lucid, almost convincing terms: the same kind of
warning that is passed on to every contactee in one way or another.

Dino Kraspedon's real identity remained a mystery for years. The book
ended up on shelves next to George Adamski's works. (Like Adamski,
Kraspedon claimed that he sometimes met the Venusians in the heart of
cities, one such meeting taking place at a railroad station in Sao
Paulo.) Then, in 1965, Dino Kraspedon surfaced as a self-styled
prophet named Aladino Felix. He warned of a disaster about to take
place in Rio de Janeiro. Sure enough, floods and landslides struck a
month later, killing 600. In 1966, he warned that a Russian cosmonaut
would soon die,* and in the fall of 1967 he appeared on television in
Brazil to soberly discuss the forthcoming assassinations in the United
States, naming Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy.

The startling accuracy of his major and minor predictions impressed
many people, of course. When he started predicting an outbreak of
violence, bombings and murders in Brazil in 1968, no one was too
surprised when a wave of strange terrorist attacks actually began.

Police stations and public buildings in Sao Paulo were dynamited.

There was a wave of bank robberies, and an armored payroll train was
heisted. The Brazilian police worked overtime and soon rounded up
eighteen members of the gang. A twenty-five-year-old policeman named
Jesse Morais proved to be the gang's bomb expert. They had blown up
Second Army Headquarters, a major newspaper, and even the American
consulate. When the gang members started to sing, it was learned that
they planned to assassinate top gover nment officials and eventually
take over the entire country of Brazil. Jesse Morais had been promised
the job of police chief in the new government.

The leader of this ring was... Aladino Felix!

continued in [2/2] Occult Entities relations to UFOnauts

FWD (IUFO) [2/2] Occult Entities connections to UFOnauts

continued from [1/2] Occult Entities connections to UFOnauts

When he was arrested on August 22, 1968, the flying saucer prophet
declared, "I was sent here as an ambassador to the Earth from Venus.
My friends from space will come here and free me and avenge my arrest.
You can look for tragic consequences to humanity when the flying
saucers invade this planet."

Once again the classic, proven pattern had occurred. Another human
being had been engulfed by the ultraterrestrials and led down the road
to ruin. There is no clinical psychiatric explanation for these cases.
These men (it has happened to women, too) experienced a succession of
convincing events with flying saucers and the UTs. Then they were
smothered with promises or ideas that destroyed them.

In the fall of 1967, when Dino Kraspedon was publicly issuing his
uncanny predictions in Brazil, another group was battening down the
hatches in Denmark, preparing for the end of the world. A man named
Knud Weiking began receiving telepathic flashes in May 1967, including
a number of impressive prophecies that came true. (Just prior to the
capture of the U.S. "spy" ship Pueblo off Korea in January 1968,
Weiking warned, "Watch Korea. ") He was then instructed to build a
lead-lined bomb shelter and prepare fo r a holocaust on December 24,
1967. This seemed like an impossible task because twenty-five tons of
lead were needed and the total costs exceeded $30,000. But donations
poured in, and voluntary labor materialized. The shelter was built in
about three weeks. On December 22, Weiking and his friends were "told"
to leave the shelter and lock it up. A telephone blackout next
occurred, lasting throughout the Christmas holidays and cutting off
all of the participants from one another.

Meanwhile, mediums, telepaths, sensitives and UFO contactees
throughout the world were all reporting identical messages. There was
definitely going to be an unprecedented event on December 24, 1967.
Ashtar was talking through Ouija boards to people who had never before
heard the name. Another busy entity named Orlon was spreading the
word. The curious thing about these messages was that they were all
phrased in the same manner, no matter what language was being used.
They all carried the same warning. Peopl e were reporting strange
dreams that December, dreams involving symbols of Christmas (such as
Christmas cards scattered through a room). There were also reports of
dead telephones and glowing entities prowling through bedrooms and
homes. Many of these messages, dreams and prophecies were collected
together by a British organization calling itself Universal Links. The
stage was set for doomsday. Thousands, perhaps even millions, of
people had been warned. At that time I didn't know about Universal
Links or m any of these predictions. But that Christmas week I
received one of those strange phone calls that had become part of my
life. At midnight on December 24, I was told, a great light would
appear in the sky, and then...

Various contactees began to report in to me from all over the country,
all with the same message. Christmas Eve was going to be it! The
Danish cult locked themselves up in their bomb shelter that night
while I sat by my phone, watching out the window of my apartment on
Thirty-third Street in New York City. (I had a good view of the sky.)

After the imaginary crisis had passed, the American wire services
finally carried stories about the cowering Danes, ridiculing them, of
course. But Mr. Weiking came up with a message that explained it all:
"I told you two thousand years ago that a time would be given and even
so I would not come. If you had read your Bible a little more
carefully, you would have borne in mind the story of the bridegroom
who did not come at the time he was expected. Be watchful so that you
are not found without oil in your l amps. I have told you I will come
with suddenness, and I shall be coming soon!"

It was all a dry run! Actually, it was a rather impressive sequence of
events, and it really proved something very important. Many
predictions of the December 24 disaster had been documented well in
advance of that date. These messages came through in many different
countries, from people who had no knowledge of or communication with
one another. The UFO contactees received the same identical messages
as the trance mediums communing with spirits. A link had been
established. It was now clear (to me anyway) that all of these people
were tuned into a central source. My earlier speculations seemed
true-the UFO entities and the spirit entities were part of the same
gigantic system. So more pieces of this tremendous puzzle were falling
into place. A long series of events had apparently been staged to warn
us of that tiger behind the door. Some of the entities were evil
liars. They had ruined the lives of many by producing "proof' which
led to false beliefs and irrespons ible actions. Kraspedon, Dr.
Laughead and Knu d Weiking had been victims in this enormous game.

There were so many others.

One night in the early 1960s (exact date undetermined) a young man
named Fred Evans was out driving with his girlfriend when a glowing,
saucer-shaped object silently soared out of the night sky and buzzed
their car. This marked the beginning of Mr. Evans' research into UFOs
and astrology. By 1967, he had installed himself as a prophet and was
predicting major black uprisings.

In the spring of 1968, Fred Ahmed Evans moved into Cleveland, Ohio,
and opened a storefront with a sign over the door declaring it to be
"The New Libya." Then, on the night of July 23, 1968, rioting broke
out in Cleveland. Snipers dressed in African clothing killed ten and
wounded nineteen before the police brought the situation under
control. The leader of the ring of well-equipped, well-organized
snipers was Fred Ahmed Evans.

Another UFO prophet had gone wrong.

In California, a man named Allen Noonan claims to have experienced
still another variation of this peculiar mindwarping phenomenon. Soon
after his discharge from the Army following World War II, Noonan went
to work for a company handling outdoor billboards. One day, he says,
he was working on a billboard when suddenly he was taken in astral
form to a strange place. He found himself in a huge white building
filled with light. A group of "elders" were situated around a glowing
throne, and a great voice boomed from that throne and asked, "Will you
agree to be the Savior of the World?"

Noonan quickly agreed to this role. Then he was told, "You may die in
the hands of your fellowmen. Their sin shall remain with you until the
Mother Comforter comes to deliver them."

The next thing he knew, he was back in his body working on the
signboard. In later experiences, he allegedly visited various planets
such as Venus, and he frequently received telepathic messages and
instructions from our old friend Ashtar. In this case, he knew it as
"the Ashtar Command and the United Planets Organization."

When Noonan was interviewed by Lloyd Mallan for True magazine, he
revealed, "I believe that I am the Cosmic Master as well as the New
Messiah. I believe that a million years ago when this planet was young
I was chosen to come to the earth and bring with me a Space Command.

"The Space Command flies in and out of the earth. The earth is hollow
and the Higher Command, the Galactic Command, already has bases inside
the earth. There are great openings at each pole of the earth, and
what we call the northern lights is only the Great Central Sun shining
out of these openings. Many people coming from the polar regions have
reported seeing flying saucers there which disappeared into the
ocean."

The hollow-earth theory is a very old one. In fact, it is one of the
oldest and most widely believed UFO explanations around. A great many
books were published about it in the nineteenth century, including a
strange little novel called The Smoky God which was supposed to be the
true experiences of two Scandinavian fishermen who accidentally sailed
through the hole at the North Pole and spent a year living among the
gentle giants who inhabited the beautiful inside of our planet.

During his interview with Mallan, Mr. Noonan demonstrated his
abilities by causing two peculiar UFO-shaped "clouds" to materialize
outside his window. Mallan photographed the phenomenon and was hard
pressed to explain it. We might point out that many other contactee
claimants were able to provide equally convincing demonstrations.
Brilliantly glowing UFOs frequently appeared and maneuvered directly
over the auditoriums where they were lecturing, waltzing around the
skies in front of dozens and even hundreds of fascinated witnesses.

Allen Noonan is not the only Space Age messiah appointed by the Ashtar
command. Dozens of humble, ordinary people suddenly turn into UFO
evangelists after a flying saucer enters their lives. Dino Kraspedon
did a lot of preaching and wrote a "new Bible" before he finally
turned terrorist. Lifelong atheists have become religious fanatics
almost over night after their UFO encounters. Such people are now
becoming regulars on radio and TV talk shows all across the country.

One night in November 1958, an Arkansas truck driver was unexpectedly
introduced into the shadowy half world of the ultraterrestrials. R. D.
Smallridge was making a routine trip to deliver a truckload of eggs
from Hardy, Arkansas, to Memphis, Tennessee. He stopped for a cup of
coffee, as was his habit, at an all-night truck stop near Black Rock,
Arkansas. When he left the eatery, he checked his watch with the wall
clock. It was exactly 2 A.M. After looking over his tires and truck
routinely, he started his engine and headed for the highway again. The
next lap of the trip covered 60 miles to Trumann, Arkansas, where he
usually stopped for another cup of coffee.

But, according to his story, he never remembers reaching the highway.

The next thing he knew he was pulling up in front of the luncheonette
in Trumann. When he walked into the restaurant and looked at its
clock, he was astounded. It was 2:15 A.M. "I had traveled sixty miles
in eight minutes," he declared.

This trip normally required changing highways (from Route 63 to Route
67) and passing over a state weight scale near Jonesboro. He could not
remember doing any of this. Somehow he had traveled 450 miles per hour
between Black Rock and Trumann!

A wide variety of strange, inexplicable events engulfed Mr. Smallridge
after this. Eventually he gave up truck driving and became a minister,
traveling about the country and preaching. December 1967 found him in
California. Late one night he put aside the book he was reading and
strolled over to the clock on the mantel in the home where he was
staying. It was exactly 12:05 A.M. Suddenly, he swears, a bright blue
light materialized and drifted toward him. Just as it touched him the
room faded away, and he di scovered himself standing in another room
surrounded by a group of strange humanlike beings. He claims that
these people were conversing in an odd language he had never heard
beforeyet he was able to understand every word and could communicate
with them. They told him, among other things, that Martin Luther King
and Robert Kennedy would die suddenly in 1968 and that there would be
widespread rioting and civil unrest. After about two hours of this,
Smallridge was instantly transfer red back to the California living
room. He was still standing in front of the clock. It was still 12:05
A.M.!

Here, once again, we have a case that can be easily dismissed as too
absurd for consideration. But, believe it or not, there is nothing
exceptional about Mr. Smallridge's claims. Similar incidents are being
reported from all over the world. Because they are so outlandish, they
are rarely well publicized.

The strange language mentioned by Smallridge turns up again and again
in these stories. It seems to be directly related to the well-known
religious phenomenon of speaking in tongues. Sometimes whole
congregations enter a trancelike state and begin to babble in this
language which is part baby talk, part Greek, part Indian and part
unknown. Many mediums have laboriously copied down whole vocabularies
for this unknown tongue. In the 1890s one Helene Smith in Geneva,
Switzerland, a psychic who had UFO-type exp eriences, produced a
veritable dictionary of a "Martian" language. In my first visits with
a West Virginia contactee, Woodrow Derenberger, he rattled off the
language of UFO entity Indrid Cold, speaking the strange jargon as
easily as he spoke English. (It did not seem to be a made-up language
or a hoax. It had structure and grammar.) Numerous cases already cited
in this book have mentioned how the UFO occupants spoke in a language
that the witnesses couldn't unde rstand. But some contactees claim
that they were able to understand this language instantly, as if it
were a second tongue lying dormant in some recess of their brains.
Brazil's Aladino Felix often spoke in what he called "the universal
language," described by reporters as "a hodgepodge of Hebrew, Greek,
and Latin." This could also describe the language I have heard the
other contactees speak. Greek is frequently employed by entities in
UFO contacts. A large section of the "inspired" book Oahspe is devoted
to a complete explanation of a sup posedly an cient language known as
Panic (language of Pan, a lost continent), complete with vocabulary
and written symbols. It appears to be a combination of Hebrew, Greek,
Latin, American Indian, and Chinese. To compose such a language as a
hoax, Dr. Newbrough, the medium who wrote Oahspe, would have had to
have been a brilliant linguist, and it would have taken many years for
one man to assemble such a complex vocabulary. Buried within the fine
print of Oahspe there are many words which I have heard UFO contactees
u se! Not many people have the patience and scholarship to read
Oahspe, and I've yet to meet a contactee who had even heard of it!

So here we have another piece of neglected evidence: the actual
language of the ufonauts. It is not a secret. It is known and spoken
by many.

Time Distortion and Distention

Smallridge's sudden transfer across sixty miles of earthly space might
have been caused by a phenomenon known as apporting in occult lore and
teleportation in science fiction. There are many documented instances
in which objects and human beings have been transported
instantaneously over great distances by some unnatural force that
defies explanation. This force seems to operate outside the man-made
boundaries of time and space. In theory, such events could be caused
by converting the energy of atoms into a transmissible beam,
projecting that beam to a distant point with the speed of light, and
then reconstructing the original atoms. Some scientists think this may
eventually be a feasible process for our advancing technology.

But somebody else has been doing it for centuries.

Early in May 1968, Dr. Gerardo Vidal and his wife got into their car,
a Peugeot 403, at Chascomus, Argentina, to drive to the town of Maipu
some 150 kilometers to the south. They traveled along National Route
2, following a car carrying two friends who were heading for Maipu, to
visit relatives. When they reached Maipu, they found the Vidals were
not behind them. They turned around and retraced their route,
expecting to find the Vidals changing a tire or laboring over the
motor. But Dr. and Mrs. Vidal were gone.

Two days later the Rapallini family in Maipu received a phone call
from the Argentine consulate in Mexico City-6,400 kilometers away. It
was Dr. Vidal, and his incredible story later made headlines in the
newspapers in Buenos Aires and Cordoba.

He and his wife had just left the suburbs of Chascomus, he reported
later, when a dense fog suddenly appeared in front of them and
enveloped their car. The next forty-eight hours were a total blank.
They woke up, still in the car, parked on an unfamiliar side road.
Both had a pain at the back of their heads but were otherwise unhurt.
Dr. Vidal got out of his car and inspected it, finding that it was
badly scorched, as if a blowtorch had been applied to its surface. He
started driving through the strange sce nery, searching for a sign or
landmark. When they saw people by the road, they stopped and asked for
directions and were dumbfounded to learn that they were in Mexico!
Their watches had stopped, but they quickly learned that two days had
somehow passed since they first started out from Chascomus.

They drove to the Argentine consulate in Mexico City and told their
story to amazed officials. Consul Senor Rafael Lopez Pellegrini
advised them to keep quiet while an investigation was held. Their car
was shipped off to the United States for examination (no information
on whom it was sent to), and later they were given a replacement of
the same make.

Dr. and Senora Vidal flew back to Argentina and went into seclusion,
hiding from the press. The lid came down on the whole story. But
reporters discovered that on the same night they vanished a man had
checked into the Maipu Hospital for medical treatment, claiming that
he, too, had encountered a strange fog which had left him badly shaken
and nauseated.

All these incidents took place in the vicinity of Bahia Blanca, where
an Argentine businessman had undergone a similar experience in 1959.

Several of the better UFO books of the 1950s recount other cases in
which human beings were suddenly transported through space and time
involuntarily. Time lapses and inexplicable periods of total amnesia
are a key aspect in the UFO phenomenon, I have now received well over
100 reports in which witnesses have lost from five minutes to several
hours immediately after sighting an unidentified flying object. In
nearly every case, these people were riding in vehicles at the time.
Almost all contactee claimants experience blackouts. Some suffer one
or more such blackouts or fainting spells months or even years before
they finally seem to undergo direct contact with a grounded UFO. There
does not appear to be a verifiable medical cause for this unusual
effect, nor does it seem to have a psychological foundation.

In Noonan and Smallridge we have astral projection or classic examples
of "instantaneous experience." The body remains apparently in a fixed
position (in front of the billboard or the California clock) while the
mind takes a trip of sorts. Based upon what we now know of the
phenomenon, it is possible that these two men were actually
experiencing the reliving of a hidden memory. In other words, we must
consider the possibility that Smallridge had held his two-hour
conversation with the entities weeks, months , or even years before he
finally remembered it. The memory of this conversation was then
suppressed in the same way that the Hills were made to forget their
experiences. Then, at a time chosen by the entities, a ray of some
sort was directed at Smallridge (the blue light), and his memory was
triggered. He was made to remember the earlier conversation as if it
had just happened.

There is another type of experience, which I call time compression.
Here the witness undergoes a sequence of events that seem to consume a
specific period of time. Later he or she discovers that only a few
minutes had actually passed, even though the whole sequence seemed to
consume hours. Time compression is common among contactees who think
they have been taken on visits to other planets.

I do not believe that any of these people are suffering directly from
clinical insanity. Rather, the evidence seems to indicate that their
minds are manipulated by an exterior influence and that sometimes
their intellects are unable to digest the information they are given,
and their emotional structure is unable to retain its stability in the
face of these experiences. So some of these people crack up under the
strain, or at best, they greatly misinterpret these events. Induced
confabulation produces memor ies of experiences that are convincingly
real, and a chain reaction of emotional responses creates irrational
fanaticism. These people abandon their jobs and devote all of their
time and thought to spreading the gospel of the space people. Their
family relationships disintegrate because all of their energies are
channeled into one direction. They become martyrs to their cause, be
it the eminent arrival of the Big Brothers or the Second Coming of
Christ; or, as in the case of the run-of-the-mill hard-core UFO
enthusiasts, trying to convince the world that flying saucers are real
and are extraterrestrial.

What all this really means is that someone or something actually has
the power to completely possess and control the human mind. Human
beings can be manipulated through this power and used for both good
and evil purposes.

We have no way of knowing how many human beings throughout the world
may have been processed in this manner, because they would have
absolutely no memory of undergoing the experience, and so we have no
way of determining who among us has strange and sinister "programs"
lying dormant in the dark corners of his mind.

Suppose the plan is to process millions of people and then at some
future date trigger all of those minds at one time? Would we suddenly
have a world of saints? Or would we have a world of armed maniacs
shooting at one another from bell towers?

Thursday, May 31, 2001

John Edward Chat on Thursday & Articles of Note

From: Barry Karr

John Edward Chat Session Tomorrow, Thursday, May 31, 2001

Ever thought to ask John Edward what he knows about the cold reading
technique? Or what he has to say about the November 17, 2000 "Dateline
NBC"
with Joe Nickell where he was caught doing a hot reading of an NBC
camera
man? Or whether he thinks Gary Schwartz really does believe in the
tooth
fairy? (sources tell us he doesn't)

Now's your chance: ask John Edward anything you want tomorrow night at
9:00
pm ET (2:00 am GMT). The self-proclaimed medium and host of the popular
Sci
Fi Channel program "Crossing Over with John Edward will be chatting on
the
Sci-Fi Chat Room. Go to http://www.scifi.com/chat/ to find out more
about
how to log on tomorrow night.

Edward, who claims to communicate messages from the spirit world to
members
of his show's audience, has also been channeling criticism from
skeptics
ever since Time published an article by Leon Jaroff in March of this
year.
The article cites claims by an audience member that readings on
"Crossing
Over" are doctored with misleading editing and possible
eavesdropping. This
article prompted the March 6, 2001 "Larry King Live" with Jaroff and
Paul
Kurtz. The show's producers vehemently denied these allegations in a
letter
to Time's editors last month. Edward continues to stand by the policy
that
he "does not respond to criticism," but this vow of silence does not
satisfy
his critics.

While fans of John Edward's show and live appearances are amazed by his
seemingly inexplicable performances, Nickell says that skeptics are not
at
all baffled by his demonstrations. "Mediumship has been around since
the
beginnings of the Spiritualist religious movement in the mid-1800s.
Magicians and skeptics have understood their techniques since the days
when
Houdini exposed many of them as frauds. With the exception of its
slick,
made-for-television packaging, Edward's feats are nothing more than
age-old
techniques of subtly eliciting information from people who are not
aware
that they-not the dead-are providing it."

"A controversial cancer treatment is now getting some new attention.
The
National Cancer Institute has agreed to review stories from patients
who
say they've been helped by 714-X, a drug that is not sold in the United
States."

NY Post Exclusive

WASHINGTON - President Bush's team has dumped an $860,000 federal
program
that taught public-housing tenants to burn incense, carry lucky
gemstones
and wear feel-good colors like apricot to reduce stress.

Scientific Method Employed By NASA proves that Skeptic Martin
Gardner Has No Eyes, Mouth or Nose!

Along with the recent release of a new, high-resolution picture of the Cydonia 'face' formation came a flurry of press reports directly based on NASA statements that
the matter has now been resolved once and for all: the face is natural formation, just one average Martian mesa out of many. The MGS science team, we are
informed, has studied the matter carefully, using the Mars Global Surveyor's laser altimeter. A space.com article informs us that

The laser altimetry data are perhaps even more convincing than overhead photos that the Face is natural. 3-D elevation maps reveal the formation from
any angle, unaltered by lights and shadow. There are no eyes, no nose and no mouth!

Articles of Note

"My girlfriend, Kaori, and I are preparing for a day trip to the Noto
Peninsula on the northern coast of Japan when the man we are traveling
to
see calls with a friendly piece of advice about our visit. "Don't stay
out
too late tonight," says Johsen Takano. "Aliens will abduct you." He's
only
half joking."

Demise of Aryan Nations is chapter in a bigger story
By Larry Fish
PHILIDELPHIA INQUIRER

"The legendary face of Mars has graced tabloid newspaper covers,
inspired
theories of alien civilizations and starred in a Hollywood film. But
new
high-resolution satellite images unmask the truth underneath the
peculiar
rock formation."

Wednesday, May 30, 2001

MAGAZINE ARTICLES 8

From: Raymond Nelke

CRYPTOZOOLOGY - Bigfoot

Hot pursuit Who knows what our vast forests are bearing silent witness to at this moment? If Thom Powell and the other curators of
the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization have their way, Bigfoot's days of stealth are numbered...
From - Date - Author
Red Herring - December 18, 2000 - Samantha Martin-Evans

Books In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex... Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed... My Quest for the Yeti:
Confronting the Himalayas' Deepest Mystery... Anil's Ghost...
From - Date
Outside - May 2000

Rough justice Thylacinus cynocephalus--confusingly known as both the Tasmanian tiger and Tasmanian wolf--developed a bad
reputation. What is the truth? Surprisingly, modern experts can only guess. They have no tigers to study...
From - Date - Author
NewScientist - May 19, 2001 - Leigh Dayton

Cloning Noah's Ark In late November a humble Iowa cow is slated to give birth to the world's first cloned endangered species, a baby
bull to be named Noah. Noah will be just the first creature up the ramp of the ark of endangered species that we and other scientists are
currently attempting to clone...

EXCERPT - "... A similar difficulty has hobbled efforts by Australian scientists to clone a thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger,
..."

Tuesday, May 29, 2001

The Urban Ledgend of Brest Cancer & Abortions was - RE: [Rush-Room] Why the
Silence About Abortion and Breast Cancer?

The increase in breast cancer for women who have had abortions is often
cited by pro-life conservatives as just one more reason NOT to have an
abortion.

The "silence" about abortion and it's link to increased breast cancer is
due
to the fact that there simply isn't any connection.

From: http://medhlp.netusa.net/lib/cancernet/600353.htm
"A large-scale epidemiologic study of this question, reported in The New
England Journal of Medicine in 1997, determined that the risk of
developing
breast cancer for women with a history of induced abortion was not
different
from the risk for women without such a history."

Women who have an abortion are no more likely to develop breast cancer
than
their counterparts who do not have an abortion.

I'm not saying that there aren't health risks associated with having an
abortion. As with any invasive surgery there is always the chance of
infection and other complications. Indeed, when abortion was relegated
to
back alley clinics, prior to Roe v. Wade, complications were quite
frequent.
From a common sense stand point one has to wonder how surgery performed
on
one part of the body would cause cancer in another part. In all the
annals
of empirical medical data there are simply no president for this claim.
Surgery simply does not CAUSE cancer.

I'm curious as the source of your "12 times greater" figure - even in
the
conservative pro-life literature (none of it sitting data or research) I
found on the net only mentioned a 1 to 2 times increased risk.

There are many, many good reasons not to have an abortion - but this
breast
cancer/abortion link is simply an urban ledged and citing it as fact
damages
the credibility of pro-life advocates.

Original message:

This article doesn't tell ANYTHING about the problems created by
abortion.
The increase in a woman's probability of dying from breast cancer due
solely
to an abortion is 12 times greater than the amount by which wearing a
seatbelt reduces her probability of death in a traffic accident. For a
woman who has an abortion to put on a seatbelt is about like using a
sock to
stop bleeding from the carotid artery, or putting a Band-Aid on a
gunshot
wound.